"I can't possibly believe that this light novel series' title is so long!"

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View Poll Results: How does long titles in light novels affect your anticipation in its story?

Doesn't affect the quality of the series itself, unless it blurts out an entire piece of shit premise: My Sister is Cute But Is Really a Time-Traveling Alien Dictator Sent to Enslave Young Virgin Men With Her Charm!?!!

Granted, sometimes fans find a way to shorten it, but for all those series out there that aren't fortunate to have this luxury:

This Really Fucking Long Title Hurts Word Of Mouth Advertising Because You Spend So Much Time Trying To Pick Out Non-Generic Words To Make It Stand Out When Talking About It With Your Friends And People In General Get Pretty Tired Of Typing The Same Damn Words Over And Over And The Author Doesn't Know Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit...Onii-Chan?!!

I personally really hate this trend of heaps of mediocre galge influenced gutter trash collections of paper with hackered sentences straight out of 2chan posts as titles, which offend us by calling itself "novels".

"I Can't Believe My Osananajimi Is Sleeping With My Mother Who Is Secretly the Maoh and I'm the Chosen Yuusha Who Fails At School Oh Look I Just Made A Light Novel Title wwwwww"

I'm about to resort to some hearty medieval style tradition of good ol' book burnin'.

Before this nonsense got called "light novels", at the dawn of the genre's birth, were some good sci-fi and fantasy novels written for young adults and teens, which I have fond memories of reading in my youth back in the 80s. They were basically the Japanese equivallent of Dragonlance and Xanth. Now that industry has turned into nothing but breeding ground for failed eroge writers.

Not saying there aren't any good LN anymore, but honestly, vast majoity it is steaming pile of dung.

Speaking of which, are there a place where I can find translations of novels like Legend of Galactic Heroes and The Weathering Continent? those are novels or light novels I have been meaning to read them a while back.
On other light novels, I have read some those LN's translation in Baka Tsuki. Either the translations are not so quite good, either the LN's writers have a terrible grasp on prose, which offend me as someone who grew up reading De Maupassant, Le Guin and Moorcock.

Add:

On the game, let's take classics and make them LN titles:

"My Best Friend Poked Seven Holes In My Chest And Took My Fiancée! I Will Take Back My Love!"

Not saying there aren't any good LN anymore, but honestly, vast majoity it is steaming pile of dung.

The good ones are either stemming from known game or anime titles, those that score well on the collaborator polls of Kono LN, come from famous authors or....if they are rather more obscure (relatively, like say, Hanbun no Tsuki) good luck praying you stumble upon them...

Those with the standard moe harem concept...only few execute it well. In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of C^3...

Yet still though, I don't think such harsh response is warranted. How much Forgotten Realms or other DnD novels are ultra good anyway? Majority doesn't appeal to you? Sad..but I don't see why you should let it bother you that much. Personally, I just wait until I get wind of or find something that I like by chance. In the meantime, there's plenty of other stuff to read...Hayakawa sci-fi novels...romance titles, eroge, SRPG etc.

Matters not to me. It's not like my brain can process all of the words. Only the first 2 or 3 words will be stored in my long-term memory. I don't need to remember the rest. Whenever I type the first few words in any search engines, the whole title will appear anyway.

__________________

A politically ignorant person who embraces only hedonism as the main philosophical doctrine.

I personally really hate this trend of heaps of mediocre galge influenced gutter trash collections of paper with hackered sentences straight out of 2chan posts as titles, which offend us by calling itself "novels".

"I Can't Believe My Osananajimi Is Sleeping With My Mother Who Is Secretly the Maoh and I'm the Chosen Yuusha Who Fails At School Oh Look I Just Made A Light Novel Title wwwwww"

I'm about to resort to some hearty medieval style tradition of good ol' book burnin'.

Before this nonsense got called "light novels", at the dawn of the genre's birth, were some good sci-fi and fantasy novels written for young adults and teens, which I have fond memories of reading in my youth back in the 80s. They were basically the Japanese equivallent of Dragonlance and Xanth. Now that industry has turned into nothing but breeding ground for failed eroge writers.

Not saying there aren't any good LN anymore, but honestly, vast majoity it is steaming pile of dung.

I think you prejudge some of these, which I used to do too. Some of these long titled light novels are not as bad as they seemed to be (once in a while, you get a few that touch on deeper emotions and themes alongside their slapstick comedy). And if you want to lay blame and dispense your hate, you should extend it to the group of readers who are feeding the industry, and the society which has created such a group of readers. Not to mention that what determines entertainment value to one is subjective. And what you like and enjoy might be garbage to others *shrug* Though I agree somewhat with some of your points, I won't go so far as to start becoming self-righteous on what constitutes good literature and call what others enjoy dung............ And I don't get why you are bringing galge and eroge in, I certainly don't feel anything in such books I read resembling those, all I get from those I read is a good dose of laughter and face-palming.

On a side note, Dragonlance was nostalgic. The fact that most of major stories and trilogies were written by the same authors, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, makes it very coherent and enjoyable to me. I also applaud the effort the publishers made in making FR stories coherent through the tough scrutiny on the manuscripts. Though those were the old days...... And speaking of trash, the West also have a fair amount of literature which I personally would consider trash.

I think you prejudge some of these, which I used to do too. Some of these long titled light novels are not as bad as they seemed to be (once in a while, you get a few that touch on deeper emotions and themes alongside their slapstick comedy). And if you want to lay blame and dispense your hate, you should extend it to the group of readers who are feeding the industry, and the society which has created such a group of readers. Not to mention that what determines entertainment value to one is subjective. And what you like and enjoy might be garbage to others *shrug* Though I agree somewhat with some of your points, I won't go so far as to start becoming self-righteous on what constitutes good literature and call what others enjoy dung............ And I don't get why you are bringing galge and eroge in, I certainly don't feel anything in such books I read resembling those, all I get from those I read is a good dose of laughter and face-palming.

On a side note, Dragonlance was nostalgic. The fact that most of major stories and trilogies were written by the same authors, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, makes it very coherent and enjoyable to me. I also applaud the effort the publishers made in making FR stories coherent through the tough scrutiny on the manuscripts. Though those were the old days...... And speaking of trash, the West also have a fair amount of literature which I personally would consider trash.

I can call a horse dung a peach, but it's still a bloody horse dung.
Btw, my criticism is towards the overall direction of the market, not just the "hey I took broken sentences from speechstyle of anonymous forums and made it a title" garbage.

I've been in the Japanese otaku market and fandom longer than most here have probably been alive, and done vast amount of reading and playing. You may not find my prejudice fair, but trust me, there's a foundation for it. As for eroge, it would be a BLOODY LONG STORY if I expained it, but just take home that transition of galge writings from two decades ago found itself into the eroge industry shortly after the Doukyuusei and LVNs hit, virtually making it indistinguishable for the majority of the market. The types of talent that used to find itself into that market latched itself onto the light novel market starting in the 2000s, incorporating its style of writing. The audiences shared similar taste, which I like to dub the galge inheritence.

And in all three of those markets, stinking pile of horse manure composes vast majority the market.
If you haven't caught my drift, I'm not entirely serious with the exaggerated venom, I'm humorously calling out how crappy the whole mess of things out there is. Maybe I should use bloody more.

I'm glad Sasamoto Yuuichi (you may know him for Miniskirt Pirates/Mouretsu Pirates) is still around, he was one of the early pioneers of the market looong before it was dubbed "light novels". Hell, by many he's pretty much considered the father of the industry. The Fairy Operation series (Yousei Sakusen), IMO his best work from the mid 80s, always holds a special place in my memory.

Every time (2 times) I see a LN with a long name it ends up poo poo. OreImo isn't bad, but has a couple of characters who annoy me. Onii-chan No Koto Nanka Zenzen Suki Janain Dakara Ne!! has an abhorrent plot about an incestuous nymph, and plain crappy art to top it off.

Speaking of which, are there a place where I can find translations of novels like Legend of Galactic Heroes and The Weathering Continent? those are novels or light novels I have been meaning to read them a while back.
On other light novels, I have read some those LN's translation in Baka Tsuki. Either the translations are not so quite good, either the LN's writers have a terrible grasp on prose, which offend me as someone who grew up reading De Maupassant, Le Guin and Moorcock.

Add:

On the game, let's take classics and make them LN titles:

"My Best Friend Poked Seven Holes In My Chest And Took My Fiancée! I Will Take Back My Love!"

Regards translations, I'm reminded of Matt Thorn, a translator who noted that when translating Japanese, you must have an ear for voice. All too often, translators translate without quite understanding the character's voice, which is probably why LNs sound so bland. It's like someone taking a British TV series, with all the accents and social strata, and dubbing it into French and everyone sounds the same.

tl;dr, LN translators on the whole translate the words, but don't really capture the voice of the characters.

Though it can also be that the original authors don't quite have the ability to convey the language, or that the translators and editors don't have the ability to convey the language in English. Off the cuff observation suggests that most young people of my generation and my younger brother's generation lack the language skills to express themselves beyond simple English.

__________________

~Speaking my mind, even when it costs me~One must forgive one's enemies, but not before they are hanged.Heinrich Heine.

Long titles are a real pain in the arse when you're making a draft post to an Awards and you have no choice but to type in the full name...

Thats what copy and paste is for old chap

Anyhow, long titles are interesting but they really mean nothing more then a regular title. A story with a long title is equally as possible to being good/bad then a story with a short one. Also longer titles don't necessarily tell you what the story is about, for example Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai and Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai. Oreimo's title leads you to believe its going to be a generic incest rom-com but it is actually something more (in my opinion at least) and AnoHana's title doesn't really suggest at all what it is about.

Regards translations, I'm reminded of Matt Thorn, a translator who noted that when translating Japanese, you must have an ear for voice. All too often, translators translate without quite understanding the character's voice, which is probably why LNs sound so bland. It's like someone taking a British TV series, with all the accents and social strata, and dubbing it into French and everyone sounds the same.

tl;dr, LN translators on the whole translate the words, but don't really capture the voice of the characters.

Even though this is a bit of a side-topic, I have to agree with this, though I would also add that this "voice" aspect applies just as much if not more so to the narration. I have to admit that I have a hard time reading most light novel fan translations. The intent of these translations often seems to be conveying the intent of the plot (i.e. so that everyone can understand "what happened"), but there's little apparent thought given to either the voice of the author or the voice of the characters. But this is perhaps fairly obvious, because most fan translators are not "authors"; they act more like "converters" (like hopefully-smarter versions of Google Translate). That makes sense; you get what you pay for, and a novel is a much larger investment than anime or manga. I'm not blaming anyone involved. Fan translations are feeding an audience who just wants to know what happens as soon as possible, and chomp at the bit for spoilers and summaries until the moment the fan translation is out. But I do wonder a bit if this further biases the perception of the literary value of the medium (independent from aohige's argument that most of the medium isn't all that great in the first place). If the idea is to put English readers on an "even playing field", there's more to the story than just "being able to understand the plot".

(But to aohige's point that the Light Novel industry inherited a lot of its themes and writing elements/styles from the eroge/galge industry, it may be worth pointing out that the decline in the eroge industry over the last many years has been attributed in no small part to increased competition (for fan time) from light novels. It's probably no surprise that they use many of the same character designers as well. Light novels are much cheaper than galge/eroge, both to produce and to buy, and can still be popular without requiring a 18+ rating (and, consequently, it's harder to sell all-ages galge because people could just read light novels instead). So while I'm not condemning the material, I do think the overall point does seem to follow logically.)

I do wonder why some creators like to put such long titles. Perhaps it grabs people's attention? Or maybe they just think it's funny.

The title of a work is usually a collaboration between the writer and the editor. If the editor doesn't think that a particular book can stand out enough from the other books in a store, then it's more likely to get a title or cover that can stand out more. If you put the premise of the book right in the title, then it can draw a potential reader's attention before he reads the synopsis or blurb. For established authors this isn't as important as they already have fanbases, but it can mean the difference between making and breaking newer authors. This seems to be a sign that the editors recognize how saturated the market is.

Manga don't have this issue since they're usually initially published in anthologies, so they can be sampled by potential readers in a less risky way.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wild Goose

Regards translations, I'm reminded of Matt Thorn, a translator who noted that when translating Japanese, you must have an ear for voice. All too often, translators translate without quite understanding the character's voice, which is probably why LNs sound so bland. It's like someone taking a British TV series, with all the accents and social strata, and dubbing it into French and everyone sounds the same.

tl;dr, LN translators on the whole translate the words, but don't really capture the voice of the characters.

Though it can also be that the original authors don't quite have the ability to convey the language, or that the translators and editors don't have the ability to convey the language in English. Off the cuff observation suggests that most young people of my generation and my younger brother's generation lack the language skills to express themselves beyond simple English.

Localization is an art more than it is a science, and a translator has to be a good writer in order to do a really good job. A good editor is also going to make a difference. Fan works (and a lot of professional works) aren't going to get that much quality devoted to them, so it's pretty much an unsolvable conundrum. Add the numerous differences between Japanese and English both linguistically and culturally, and it's no wonder that most translations contend themselves with being just adequate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soverence

Thats what copy and paste is for old chap

Anyhow, long titles are interesting but they really mean nothing more then a regular title. A story with a long title is equally as possible to being good/bad then a story with a short one. Also longer titles don't necessarily tell you what the story is about, for example Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai and Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae wo Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai. Oreimo's title leads you to believe its going to be a generic incest rom-com but it is actually something more (in my opinion at least) and AnoHana's title doesn't really suggest at all what it is about.

Personally, I find really long titles to be aesthetically displeasing and Anohana is one of the worst offenders out there. A fantastic wordsmith like Harlan Ellison can get away with it, but most light novel authors are nowhere nearly as good.

__________________

The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won...

I don't mind the long titles really. They're a bit ludicrous and hard to remember so everyone just ends up using the abbreviated version anyway. Even the English language release of the manga based on Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai just says "OREIMO" on the front, which makes no sense to the casual browser!